Word: wares
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Around the turn of the last century, Friedrich Nietzsche killed God and replaced him with the Ubermensch, or superman. In the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon; 380 pages; $27.50), Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware goes Nietzsche one better. He replaces God with Superman, the caped hero, who becomes a God/father metaphor to the emotionally crippled title character. Then Ware kills Superman too--or at least a man in a Superman suit, who, in a single bound, leaps to his death from a tall building in a scene, witnessed by Jimmy, that sets the tale's poignant...
...might guess that Ware, 32, has father issues. You wouldn't be far wrong. He began the book, six years in the making, in part to "work out stuff"--namely, his relationship to his own father, whom he never met until a brief, awkward reunion just before his dad died, when Ware was more than halfway through the book. "I was resistant to meeting him, and I was trying to figure out why," says Ware. Did he? "No! That's the rotten part of it. I feel even more confused than ever...
Which is not to say Ware is Jimmy Corrigan. A shy, potato-shaped Untermensch, Corrigan is the 36-year-old correlative (neither smart nor a kid) to comic child-men like Charlie Brown. He works silent hours in a cubicle. He calls his domineering mother every day. Women, not coincidentally, terrify him. One dreary Thanksgiving week, his long-lost father sends him a plane ticket to visit him in Michigan. During the tragicomic, disastrous get-together, Jimmy meets his adopted black sister Amy and his ancient grandfather (also named Jimmy), whose own 1890s Chicago childhood unfolds in a beautiful...
...didn't work in comicbooks, Chris Ware would be famous by now. And he may yet be - after being selected for the Smithsonian's design triennial, and having his work published in the New Yorker, his first general-trade book, "Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth," (Pantheon, $27.50) will appear in September...
...Cabot House Master James H. Ware, the job of leading one of Harvard's 12 residential Houses is like "being mayor of a small town...